Searching newspaper articles for an ancestor or person from history

Enter the name of the person you’re looking for in the search bar at the top of the homepage. Put a double quote mark on each side of the name and click the ‘search’ button.

The quote marks will make your search results more relevant because they tell the website that you’re looking for a phrase. This means your results will only include articles in which these words appear next to one another.

You may need to try alternative names to find the person you’re looking for. In this example we’ve included a middle name in our search, but Richard James Howard’s name might not have been included in an article in that exact way.

Richard could have been referred to as Mr R Howard, Mr Howard or Richard Howard, so it’s worth searching for a few of these variations.

If you’re looking for a woman, remember that she may have been recorded as the wife or daughter of somebody, rather than by her own name.

You can also use extra information you know about the person to focus your results. In this example, we know that Richard Howard was a chimney sweep so we’ve entered that in the search bar too.

Putting a + mark before the name you’re searching for will tell the website that while we’re interested in reports about chimney sweeps, they must always include the name ‘Richard Howard’.

Brian Chapman has worked with Wikipedia for over five years and made around 42,000 edits to the online encyclopedia. He got in touch to tell us about one of the pages he’s improved with the help of our newspapers.

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When I heard about the collaboration between The British Newspaper Archive and Wikipedia, I jumped at the chance to take part. I’ve long been fascinated by the history of football at the turn of the 20th century, with the decline in amateur players and the development of professionalism.

For such a complicated history of soccer, Wikipedia allows editors to bring together a variety of sources into a cohesive article, providing a more comprehensive account than a single person could achieve. I thought I would share a bit more about one of the articles I’ve been working on, covering the 1908 FA Charity Shield.

The development of the Football Association Charity Shield

Today the Football Association (FA) Community Shield (renamed in 2002 from the Charity Shield) is played between the winners of the Premier League and the FA Cup, but that was not always the case.

I knew that it had been formed out of the decline of the Sheriff of London Charity Shield, a previous competition in which an amateur team played a professional one, but historic newspapers reveal that the FA actually intendeded it to be a direct replacement.

The following articles from the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, printed on 22 February 1908, are particularly telling about the controversy that surrounded this change. While the FA Charity Shield was announced in one article, the following story was about the decline of the Sheriff of London Charity Shield.

Match report: Manchester United vs Queens Park Rangers

While it might be possible to find basic details about historical football matches (such as dates, players and results) in traditional reference works, it is very difficult to get hold of match reports.

The style of reporting at the time meant that only newspapers local to each team published football match reports. With online access to more than 300 newspaper titles at The British Newspaper Archive, this sort of detail can now be easily tracked down.

Unusually for the Charity Shield, the match between Football League winners Manchester United and Southern League champions Queens Park Rangers (QPR) went to a replay after a 1-1 draw. What I didn’t previously know was that QPR’s goalkeeper Charlie Shaw saved a penalty from George Stacey.

The 1908 Charity Shield replay

The replay took place on 29 August 1908 and resulted in a 4-0 victory for Manchester United. It was the first time that the game was played as the traditional season opener of the Football League.

Of course, the competition didn’t remain the same. A fixture between the Football League and the Southern League only continued to just prior to the First World War. During the war period, the two leagues were merged. A few different types of fixtures were then tried, including the one we all know today – the champions of the top league playing the FA Cup winners.

A really unexpected find in the newspaper archives was the following article from the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, published on 3 October 1908. It documents which charities benefited from the replay and first leg of the 1908 Charity Shield. We can see that more than £1,000 was raised.

After watching Sainsbury’s Christmas advert, Kate Cole was inspired to research the real story behind WW1’s Christmas Truce.

In December 1914, during first year of World War One, a remarkable event known as the Christmas Day Truce occurred in small pockets along the Western Front. 100 years later, one of Britain’s largest grocery shops has released a Christmas advert re-enacting the famous truce.

With the Sainsbury’s advert appearing on my television virtually every day since mid-November, I decided to do my own research into the Christmas Truce to determine what actually happened. I have done this by using the many local and national newspapers that have been digitally preserved by the excellent British Newspaper Archive.

Attempts to secure an official Christmas truce in 1914

Throughout the length and breadth of Britain, newspapers reported Pope Benedict XV’s attempts to secure a 12-hour Christmas truce on all sides. By 11 December 1914, it was thought that Germany was willing to have a truce.

Just a few days later, newspapers including the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette were reporting that the Pope’s attempt had failed. While the article below mentions that Russia had refused the truce, it’s interesting that of the many reports I’ve read from the beginning of December, none directly confronted Russia for opposing the truce.

Only one newspaper mentioned the (glaringly obvious) reason behind Russia’s refusal –that the date of Christmas in the Orthodox Church was not the same as that observed in the Roman Church. The absence of a reason in the majority of reports is unwitting testimony, showing that the Allies didn’t always see eye-to-eye on matters of the war.

Newspapers printed British soldiers’ Christmas Truce reports

By Wednesday 30 December, the story of the unofficial Christmas Day Truce started to reach Britain. Soldiers’ letters to their loved ones arrived and were often sent to local newspapers, then filtering through to other local and national newspapers.

You’ll find a selection of the images and reports I’ve found about Christmas in the trenches in 1914 below. The stories vary in detail, showing that the Christmas Truce was not uniform with a set beginning and end.

Each sector of the Western Front seem to have had their own version – some only allowing the burial of the dead on Christmas morning before hostilities began again, while others continued their truce though the entire festive period.

Some reports also mention that football matches occurred during the Christmas Truce. A soldier’s letter printed in the Gloucester Journal stated that ‘higher up the line – you would scarcely believe it – but they were kicking a football about between the trenches’.

The Christmas Truce was a remarkable World War One event. Even though the Pope was not successful in arranging a formal truce, the soldiers themselves achieved what generals, politicians and religious leaders could not.

Win some great prizes with The British Newspaper Archive

There are lots of exciting gifts on offer, whether you’re interested in genealogy, local history, studying World War One, the history of sport, crime research, women’s history or something completely different.

It doesn’t matter where you live; our week of competitions is open to everyone. Take a look at what you could win on our Facebook page each day:

The lovely people at BBC History Magazine have sent us this special offer to share with you:

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BBC History is the UK’s bestselling history magazine, exploring a wide range of topics every month including ancient civilisations and the two World Wars. It’s published 13 times a year, so is a great Christmas gift idea for history enthusiasts.

Today’s most-popular Christmas toys include Frozen dolls and tech gadgets, but it was a very different story 100 years ago. Newspapers from the time reveal there was a clear trend for ‘British-made’ military toys in the year that Britain joined World War One.

The ‘Great Miniature Battle’ of 1914, with trenches and barbed wire

An advert for Gamage’s department store appeared in the Daily Mirror on 4 December 1914, describing ‘the most realistic thing in Toy Warfare the world has ever seen’. A large battle reconstruction had been set up in the store’s toy hall, featuring ‘Field Guns and Howitzers fired by real gunpowder, trenches and barbed wire’.

We’re able to learn more about the miniature battle thanks to the following article, published in the Dundee Courier on 12 December 1914. It revealed that the Battle of Yser, which occurred in October 1914 and resulted in an Allied victory, was acted out four times every day. The spectators would then ‘rush to buy soldiers – from 5½d to 90s per box’.

During WW1 there was ‘never such a demand for toy soldiers’

The Dundee Courier also included an interview with one of the Directors of the department store. It revealed that, despite working around the clock to produce British and German toy soldiers in 1914, Gamage’s was overwhelmed by demand.

Children’s toys had often been imported from Germany, but in 1914 with the two nations at war, ‘British-made’ toys received a surge of popularity. There are currently 4,329 matches for the search term “British made” in newspapers from 1914 at The British Newspaper Archive, compared to 1,602 matches in 1913. This is a 35% increase in the popularity of the term, taking the number of pages currently available online for both years into consideration.

You can now explore more than 40 newspaper titles from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland at The British Newspaper Archive after another 17 Irish titles were added in November. The collection is growing all the time and currently spans 1748-1900.

It’s hard to believe, but The British Newspaper Archive has now reached the grand old age of three. We launched on 29 November 2011 with 4 million fully searchable historic newspaper pages and have come a long way since then.

Please click the image to enlarge it

A treasure trove of information

You can now search more than 9 million pages, from over 300 British and Irish newspaper titles, spanning 1710-1954. Reading all of those pages would be no mean feat – we’ve estimated that it would take you 237 years (with no tea breaks)!

One of the things we’re most proud of is that in our recent survey, 95% of you said you’d found something interesting at The British Newspaper Archive. We’re glad the newspapers are proving so useful and hope you continue to enjoy using them.

What have you been searching for? We’d love to learn about what you’re researching and how you first heard about The British Newspaper Archive. Help celebrate our birthday by telling us about your experience in the comments section below.